Young Hiker Discovers Rare 69 Million Year Old Dinosaur Fossil in Alberta Canyon

A Chance Discovery Changes Everything

While hiking with his father through Alberta's Horseshoe Canyon on a sunny, hot day in late June, 12-year-old Nathan Hrushkin stumbled upon a fossil jutting from the rock. "The first thing I said was, 'Oh my God, Dad. You need to get up here!'" It turned out to be part of a 69-million-year-old dinosaur, later identified as a juvenile hadrosaur – a duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 69 million years ago.

For Nathan, who has been "aspiring to be a paleontologist for as long as I can remember," the discovery felt like a dream come true. As he joked during a phone interview, "I really wanted to be a paleontologist before (and) now that I've found something already, at only 12 years old… I'd have a pretty killer resume." What started as a routine family outing had transformed into one of the most significant paleontological discoveries in recent years.

Filling a Critical Gap in Scientific Knowledge

The fossil Nathan Hrushkin found came from a part of the canyon where dinosaur remains are not commonly recovered, found in a layer of rock that rarely preserves fossils. "This young hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta," François Therrien, the Royal Tyrrell Museum's curator of dinosaur palaeoecology, said in the statement.

The three- to four-year-old hadrosaur lived about 69 million years ago, a time period experts don't know much about "in terms of dinosaurs living here in Canada and even in the western interior of North America." While hadrosaur bones are the most common fossils found in Alberta's badlands, few juvenile skeletons have been found, and only very few juveniles have been uncovered. As Therrien explained, "These animals were probably the most common in Alberta in the late Cretaceous period, they were probably as common as deer were today."

Professional Excavation Reveals Extraordinary Find

Once the image was reviewed, museum paleontologists confirmed the fragment belonged to a juvenile hadrosaur and visited the site to excavate 30 to 50 additional bones, all believed to come from the same animal. The bones were later removed from the site in protective jackets made from burlap and plaster and brought to a lab for further examination. One of the fossil-rich slabs weighed about 1,000 pounds and was more than four feet wide.

Paleontologist François Therrien was the first on site and quickly assembled a team once he saw the number of bones. Therrien said the youngster's response to the discovery is a textbook example of what the public should do when they come across fossils, bones and other skeletons in the area — contact the museum.

Conservation and Future Discoveries

As Dion Hrushkin, Nathan's father, explained: "The discovery of this dinosaur on a conservation site demonstrates the need for land conservation, not just to ensure the conservation of wild spaces for future generations, but also as an opportunity to learn about our natural heritage." This dual purpose was highlighted by the fact that the fossil had remained untouched for tens of millions of years in a zone protected from development, allowing experts to recover the specimen in near-intact condition.

"Every year we've come here, we've found something a little bit better than the last year," Dion said. "Now we have to try to outdo ourselves from the skeleton." Nathan's remarkable discovery demonstrates how curiosity, conservation, and scientific collaboration can unlock secrets from Earth's ancient past, inspiring a new generation of paleontologists while filling crucial gaps in our understanding of dinosaur evolution.